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THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2012–13
ROBERT K. W E B B
1 92 2 –2012
ANU. He is a creative and diligent adviser and contributor
to the Australian-based Oxford Companion to the Age of
Romanticism and Revolution, Webb was a reviewer of the
ANU Law School and he is to chair the Humanities/Social
Science review panel for the Research School of Social
Sciences in the Institute of Advanced Studies.
In a letter to the Academy accepting his appointment as an
Honorary Fellow in 1995, he wrote ‘I hope that my future work,
in or out of Australia, will continue to justify the confidence
the Academy has so unexpectedly placed in me. It is certainly
true that my experiences in Australia over the past decade
have been central in shaping most of what I have done in
that period.’
photo: courtesy of the american historical association
Robert K. Webb was an American historian who developed
strong associations with Australia. His election citation gives
some insight into the strength of these connections:
We commend to the Council of the Academy Robert Kiefer
Webb (b. 1922) for an Honorary Fellowship. He succeeds
our late Honorary Fellow, John Clive, as the leading ally of
Australian historians and the main proponent of Australian
historical scholarship in the United States and, indeed, in
Great Britain. His authority, integrity, great personal charm
and wide acquaintance make him a powerful advocate for
Australia in American and British scholarly circles.
[…] He knows more, as John Clive did, than most
Australians about Australian literature and films. Webb
is a frequent visitor to Australia. He was a member of the
committee which scrutinised the Australian Research
Council’s support for research in European History
in Australia. He duly visited most of the pre-Dawkins
universities and helped produce a courageous, sustaining
report. He has participated in seminars and conferences
on topics ranging from the history of philosophy, history
of law to the history of medicine at, to my knowledge at
least, the universities of Western Australia, Melbourne and
The Academy is pleased to be able to reproduce an obituary
written by one of Professor Webb’s American colleagues,
Professor Sandra Herbert of the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County. Professor Herbert relates that ‘…through
Bob I was able to attend an academic meeting in Australia
where I met David Oldroyd, an Australian scholar who, with
Bob, was very helpful to me as I wrote my book on Charles
Darwin as a geologist.’
obert Kiefer Webb, Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, was
born in Toledo, Ohio, on 23 November 1922, and died in
Washington, D.C., on 15 February 2012. In a long life he
contributed in major ways not only to his own field of
British history but also to the integrity and vigor of the
academic profession as a whole.
Recognised from his youth for his academic brilliance,
Bob Webb enrolled as an undergraduate at Oberlin College.
As for so many young men of his generation, his studies
were interrupted by war. Bob served in the U.S. Army
Artillery from 1943 to 1946, rising to the rank of master
sergeant. He said later that he learned in the army that he
was good at deploying people and resources. In May 1945
while stationed in the Philippines, he wrote to Howard
Robinson at Oberlin College contemplating his own future
as an historian, speculating that, while he then knew U.S.
history best, he might end up at Harvard studying 19thcentury Great Britain, possibly something to do with
church history. At war’s end Bob returned to Oberlin and
took his AB summa cum laude in 1947. For graduate school,
THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2012–13
he chose Columbia over Harvard, prompting his Oberlin
professor Frederick Artz, a Harvard alumnus, to quip that
‘I feel like a Baptist preacher whose daughter has gone on
the stage.’ (It is worth noting that Bob’s family background
was Baptist.) Bob Webb received his PhD from Columbia in
1951, having spent two years at the University of London
partly assisted by a Fulbright Fellowship.
Robert Webb concentrated on British history from the
1780s through the end of the 19th century. One overriding
problem that engaged him was explaining the relative
stability of the British state during a period of revolutions
in France. In his first book, The British Working Class Reader,
1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (1955), Webb sought
to understand ‘the challenge which a literate working class
presented to its betters.’
In Webb’s subsequent work he explored the British
tradition of religious dissent. He was interested in
studying the British non-conformists on their own terms.
He also saw their movement as providing a safety valve
for releasing social tensions. In this Webb’s work was
congruent with that of the French historian Élie Halévy.
As an indication of his high regard for Halévy, Webb
translated his Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War
into English (1966). Among the English nonconformists
Bob Webb settled on the Unitarians for his own work.
He was drawn to them by a shared sense of the value of
rational enquiry and because he noted the prominence of
Unitarians among social reformers in 19th-century Britain,
as, for example, in the Martineau family.
Webb’s biography of one of the members of that family
is still a standard work on the subject: Harriet Martineau:
A Radical Victorian (1960). Over the course of the next
40 years, Bob published extensively on the English
Unitarians, including numerous individual contributions
to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Bob’s last
public lecture, again touching on the Unitarians, was a
talk he gave in 2010 entitled ‘The Very Long Eighteenth
Century: An Experiment in the History of Religion’.
Bob’s contributions to the field of British history were
honored in 1992 by the volume Religion and Irreligion in
Victorian Society: Essays in Honor of R. K. Webb edited by
R. W. Davis and R. J. Helmstadter.
Webb served as an instructor of history at Wesleyan
University from 1951 to 1953. He then moved to Columbia
University where he remained for 17 years, during some of
that time chairing the university’s famed Contemporary
Civilization Programme. From 1968 to 1975 Webb was
editor of the American Historical Review, then still published
at the AHA’s headquarters in Washington, D. C. (Bob’s work
on AHA projects continued; in 1995 he contributed the
section on ‘Britain and Ireland Since 1760’ to The American
Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature.)
From 1975 to 1992 Bob Webb was professor of history at
the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and served
in a number of critical administrative positions, including
chair of the history department and, for a time, acting
vice chancellor for academic affairs. During his career,
Bob received two Guggenheim fellowships, and was for
many years a member of the Educational Advisory Board
of the Guggenheim Foundation. During his career Bob
was also active in the national leadership of the American
Association of University Professors.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County was a young
school, founded in 1966, and most of its history faculty
were then in their thirties. Bob was half a generation
older than the majority of his peers. Somewhat to our
initial surprise, Bob took up his new position with
zeal, investing his considerable energies in promoting
the history department and the university. Bob traded
off chairing responsibilities with Jim Mohr, and then
passed the leadership torch to John Jeffries and Jim
Grubb. Intellectually he was a ready resource to all of us.
‘Bob Webb taught the faculty’, as Victor Wexler once put
it. Bob was a loyal and generous colleague who could be
counted on for a letter of reference, a witty anecdote, or
a word of encouragement or consolation, as the occasion
required. Throughout his career Bob aided other scholars in
their work, most recently Linda Lear as she was writing her
biography of Beatrix Potter. To the end of his life Bob was
regarded with admiration and affection by his colleagues.
Bob is survived by his wife Patty Webb, their daughters
Emily Martin and Margaret Pressler, and six grandchildren.
An annual ‘Robert K. Webb Lecture’ has been established
by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which is
part of a Humanities Forum series open to the public.
S A N D RA HE RB E RT
In 1968 Webb published Modern England, which became the
standard textbook for a generation of students. In 1980,
with his former Columbia University colleague Peter Gay,
Bob published Modern Europe Since 1815, a thoughtful and
elegantly written survey of the subject.
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U N I VE RS I TY OF M A RY L A N D, B A LTI M ORE COU N T Y
This obituary first appeared in the American Historical Association’s
November 2012 issue of Perspectives on History. It is kindly reproduced
here with permission from Professor Sandra Herbert and the American
Historical Association.